Between new and bargain bin DVDs, let’s say it averages out to the price of a streaming service. I’m paying $25/month for Hulu/Disney right now, so that seems generous.

Streaming started up around 2007. If I were to buy 1 DVD per month instead of going with a streaming service, I’d have a movie collection with 192 movies I probably really like. With many people now subscribing to 3 or 4 streaming services, that equivalent movie collection could be even bigger for the same cost.

If I were to fall on hard times and need to cut back on spending, stopping the streaming services leaves me with nothing. At $10/month, I would have paid almost $2k and have nothing to show for it. With the DVDs, I could stop buying new ones, and still have a pretty solid library to pull from.

One month sure, but if I watch it more than once or take more than a month to complete a while season the subscription adds up. Plus a lot more was available to rent on DVD, which makes more sense for something I only want to watch once rather than signing up for a subscription service and hoping I remember to cancel before it renews.

To be fair I bought (and buy) many of my DVDs at thrift stores and garage sales, so the media companies didn't see my money directly. But indirectly it did enable my neighbors to buy new DVDs to fill the space they cleaned from their sale.

Perhaps I am being irrational, but I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the fragmented and rent-seeking streaming landscape. Some other people's comments here suggest I'm not the only one with strong feelings about this.